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Conservatives Used to Mock Ayn Rand -- How Did She Become a Hero to Right-Wing Nerds Everywhere?

Today's doltish conservatives, like Paul Ryan, worship her. But their forebears called Rand's work "preposterous"

August 8, 2013 |

The growing influence on the American right of Ayn Rand, the
libertarian right’s answer to Scientology’s novelist-philosopher L. Ron
Hubbard, is a wonder to behold. When she died in 1982, Alissa Rosenbaum
— the original name of the Russian-born novelist — was the leader of a
marginal cult, the Objectivists, who had long been cast out of the
mainstream American right. But the rise of Tea Party conservatism,
fueled by white racial panic and zero-sum distributional conflicts in
the Great Recession, has turned this minor, once-forgotten figure into
an icon for a new generation of nerds who imagine themselves Nietzschean
Ubermenschen oppressed by the totalitarian tyranny of the post office
and the Social Security administration.

Rand-worshipers can be
found in, among other places, the Republican-controlled House of
Representatives. At a 2005 gathering to honor her memory, House Budget
Committee Chairman Paul Ryan declared, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”

The
late Gore Vidal would not have been surprised by the former Republican
vice-presidential candidate’s choice of a patron saint. After all, it
was Vidal who observed, in a 1961 article for Esquire:

She
has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized
society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the ‘welfare’ state,
who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would
like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription:
altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and
if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.

Vidal
might be dismissed as a biased leftist. But the late William F. Buckley
Jr., the founder of post-1945 conservatism who engaged in a famous
televised spat with Vidal during the 1968 Democratic convention, shared
Vidal’s contempt for Ayn Rand. After her death in 1982, Buckley wrote in the New York Daily News:
“She was an eloquent and persuasive anti-statist, and if only she had
left it at that, but no. She had to declare that God did not exist, that
altruism was despicable, that only self-interest was good and noble.”
In 2003, Buckley described his encounter with Rand’s interminable propaganda novel “Atlas Shrugged”: “I had to flog myself to read it.”

Ayn
Rand and her “Objectivist” cult members never forgave Buckley for
reading them out of the mainstream American right, along with the
equally crackpot John Birch Society. In 1957 Buckley, then the young
editor of the flagship magazine of the conservative movement, National
Review, published a review of “Atlas Shrugged” by Whittaker Chambers,
the ex-communist intellectual who had played a key role in exposing
Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy.
Chambers titled his review “Big Sister Is Watching You.” He wrote:

Its
story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict
(locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between
the harried ranks of free enterprise and the “looters.” These are
proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, Labor, etc. etc.
The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction,
nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. “This,” she
is saying in effect, “is how things really are. These are the real
issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it,
which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.”

The juvenile plot of “Atlas Shrugged” is a melodramatic war between “Children of Light” and “Children of Darkness”:

The
Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. In so far as any of
them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble
the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously
crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in
Board rooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them
is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo
Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia.

Today’s
libertarian rightist radicals distinguish between “makers” and “takers.”
In the flagship conservative magazine of the 1950s, Whittaker Chambers
did not tolerate such crude sloganeering:

In Atlas
Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as “looters.” This
is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one
invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This
spares her the plaguey business of performing one service that her
fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth
how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough
to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one
undifferentiated damnation.

Miss
Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier
philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more
heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact,
Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche’s “last
men,” both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils
Maria. And much else comes, consciously or not, from the same source.

Chambers
concluded that despite all her talk about individualism and liberty,
Rand was driven by a romantic and illiberal vision in which a heroic
minority of superhuman geniuses would remake a corrupt society from top
to bottom:

One Big Brother is, of course, a
socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the
shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a
Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the
name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite
(I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the
industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind).

Chambers
did not live to see one of Ayn Rand’s early disciples, Alan Greenspan,
become chairman of the Federal Reserve, the ultimate technocrat of the
financial caste, if not of industrialists and engineers.

Rand’s conceited Nietzschean elitism was shared by another libertarian hero, Friedrich von Hayek, who wrote to Rand:
“You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them:
you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you
simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better
than you.” (Hayek later confessed that
he was defeated by “Atlas Shrugged”: “Although I tried seriously to
read the book, I failed, because there was no romance in it. I tried
even more diligently to read that fellow John Galt’s hundred-page
declaration of independence, and I knew I’d be questioned on all that,
but I just couldn’t get through it.”)

The mentality of Ayn Rand,
as described by Chambers back in 1957 in the pages of the leading
conservative magazine, is remarkably similar to the mentality of the Tea
Party right that seeks to sabotage government (as Rand’s heroes
sabotage the economy), no matter the consequences for the nation:

In
addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other
characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for
strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the
mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final
revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated
because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just
humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author
would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked.

What
should we conclude from the fact that Ayn Rand’s works are admired by
21st century American rightists like Paul Ryan who have forgotten, if
they ever knew about, sophisticated conservative intellectuals like
Chambers and Buckley? Gore Vidal’s comments in 1961 seem chillingly
prescient in 2013:

Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly
perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the
more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our
society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by
new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night.
Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.